Enterprise Collaboration: Guidance From the Experts

How can you spot a collaboration project in trouble? What's the best way to appeal to end users? What role do consumer networks play in the enterprise? These are just a few of the questions our experts answered in this week's roll-up. 

• Organizations Get Serious About Enterprise Collaboration in 2011. The online collaboration market has subsequently exploded into one of the fastest moving in the software-as-a-service space, so anyone trying to predict how things will evolve is either extremely brave or foolhardy. But there are some things that you can be sure will happen. 


• What Role Do LinkedIn, Facebook Play in Enterprise Collaboration? Private or closed, social networks are becoming more popular as a means of collaborating online in business. Tools such as SharePoint, Confluence and Yammer all have their uses in the collaboration space. The original sites that inspired these tools have not gone away, though. Far from it, they grow stronger on the web every day. Sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and the social giant Facebook have their own role to play in enterprise collaboration.


• SharePoint Workspace: Tips for Collaborating Effectively. Previously known as "Groove" (and originally created by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie), ShaerPoint Workspace is designed to let you take SharePoint 2010 offline. So just how can you put it to use for good collaboration? Try the following tips to make the most of your experience.


• 5 Reasons Organizations Require Real Time Collaboration. Enterprise collaboration is challenging for many organizations, but it has also become a necessity. Here are five reasons why real time collaboration is required.


• Enhancing Enterprise Content Management With Collaboration. In order to effectively deliver business value, collaboration tools must be closely linked to specific use case scenarios. Content-centric business processes such as contract management won’t benefit from Web 2.0 collaboration tools without a comprehensive ECM backbone in place. Here's a look at a couple of examples.


• Enterprise Collaboration With Office 2010, SharePoint 2010. An underutilized approach to encourage user adoption and enhance the collaboration experience in SharePoint 2010 is by using the Microsoft Office suite for creation and distribution of content. The integrated nature of the Office suite and SharePoint 2010 offers a familiar, alternative interface to a new platform that can be leveraged in many ways.
• SharePoint Collaboration: Build So They Will Come. This post will walk you through some ways to avoid the if we build it mentality and better tailor your SharePoint implementation to the people who matter the most — the end users.


• How to Spot a Collaboration Project in Trouble. Nobody’s surprised when their collaboration initiative succeeds, but they’re always surprised when it fails. Usually the warning signs were there all along. It’s a lot easier to prevent deployment and adoption issues than fix them. In my experience, the five scenarios below lead to trouble. When you know what to watch out for, you can create a project plan to head off these problems.